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How is that not exactly how it is today? Those people uploading torrents don't have any of the costs of creating the work.

by st3v3r 10y ago

zanny 10y ago
For the same reasons people habitually treat fan works as independent from commercial ones, today people are doing the work for free when in the 18th century you could make a business out of duplicating others written works for profit. Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator. Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself. It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Once again, your entire argument hinges on forgetting that there is a cost to creating the material in the first damn place. And the way you recoup those costs today is to sell copies of the work. The transit method isn't relevant, because the purpose of copyright was to allow the creator to recoup costs in creating the work, not in selling it.

How is that not exactly how it is today? Those people uploading torrents don't have any of the costs of creating the work.

by st3v3r 10y ago

How is that not exactly how it is today? Those people uploading torrents don't have any of the costs of creating the work.

zanny 10y ago

For the same reasons people habitually treat fan works as independent from commercial ones, today people are doing the work for free when in the 18th century you could make a business out of duplicating others written works for profit. Today, while counterfeiting markets like that still exist in less Internet-rich countries, once you have the Internet, the only thing such markets still apply to are novel physical inventions, and that is never done by small entrepenurs stealing other peoples work, it is by large corporations using economies of scale to produce replcias of a novel product that can undercut the original creator. Because there is an important distinction between goods and information. A good is valuable for what it is - a fridge because it cools, a car because it can move on roads. The utility is in the physical atomic composition of the product. With informational works, which is what copyright applies to, the value is exclusively in the encoded information - you can transfer it in myriad forms, from light to electrons to magnetism to etchings on a wall, but in those circumstances the media of transit is much less relevant than the material itself. It was only when the transit material was itself scarce that the argument for copyright was made. When transit becomes so cheap it is effectively free where millions will send you a copy for no charge, the assumptions are broken.

st3v3r 10y ago
Once again, your entire argument hinges on forgetting that there is a cost to creating the material in the first damn place. And the way you recoup those costs today is to sell copies of the work. The transit method isn't relevant, because the purpose of copyright was to allow the creator to recoup costs in creating the work, not in selling it.